DocMills

Ergh, well, I'm not usually serious on X but you asked! 🧵 You are a low-debt, high-reserve microstate (debt around 6% of GDP, reserves near £2 billion, Moody’s Aa3 stable) whose productive base is narrowing while the cost base compounds. Real GDP fell 5.1% then 2.5% in successive years. Insurance is the largest sector at 16.9% of income; e-gaming is second at 14.2% and shrinking in jobs and licences. Revenue spend is £1.47 billion - about £18,300 a head - and health is already a third of that and still rising. The 2022 strategy (5,000 jobs, £10 billion GDP, 100,000 people) is a permission structure... retire it. On-island i-gaming roles have halved since 2022. Live licences are in the 60s. Operators cite compliance cost and customer-acquisition cost, not your scenery. UK remote-gaming duty goes from 21% to 40% in April 2026; Gibraltar is already shedding jobs on the back of it. Write a two-page residual-jurisdiction policy: keep the operators who need English-law, sterling, non-UK substance, price the licence to cover the Gambling Supervision Commission without a bailout, and stop commissioning strategies. Redeploy the people into insurance operations, funds administration and corporate services (the sectors that still grew). The old tax moat is being levelled by the UK and by OECD rules. What remains is English law and time zone, a credible regulator, and the ability to say yes or no in weeks. Insurance, banking and other finance already out-earn gaming: productise them as one desk: captive insurance, ship registry, aircraft registry, funds. One relationship manager, one clock. Brass plates that generate no local payroll should pay a presence levy or leave (do not open a fourteenth fintech brochure)! Health is a staffing and housing problem. The 2026–27 health budget is £412 million, up £123 million on 2022/23, with a further climb planned. You cannot run a UK-shaped NHS for 85k people when consultants and dentists will not move. Three moves, in order: 1) Publish an explicit list of what Manx Care will and will not do on-island, and contract the rest to Liverpool and Manchester on a tariff cheaper than locums. 2) Convert dental to a licensed private market with a means-tested voucher (the NHS dental model does not work at this scale and pretending otherwise is why the chairs are empty). 3) Attach every sponsored clinical visa to a named housing unit. A consultant who cannot house a spouse is not a recruitment success. Split immigration in public, and price the retiree: Unemployment is 0.6%. Vacancies are the constraint, not joblessness. The mixed opinion, including among wealthy English residents, is rational: unskilled inflow stresses stock and services; skilled inflow is the only way the tax base holds. Cap non-contributory routes; fast-track named shortage occupations, employer-bonded, with a housing condition. New residents over 55 (me) pay a hypothecated health levy for five years, set against the marginal cost of elective and social care. Say this out loud. The current fog is what produces the resentment. Fix the fabric or stop talking about towns. Upper floors in Douglas, Ramsey and Peel are end-of-life because planning risk and labour cost make refurbishment irrational, while construction income has already fallen. One street, one pattern book: pre-approved conversions to flats that match the existing Victorian grain, zero fee if you build the book, compulsory purchase on anything empty for three years. That is local demand for a sector that just shrank, and it is the only housing policy that also makes the place look inhabited. New estates in Braddan do not repair Strand Street. 1 of 2 🧵